June 09, 2011

Infographics: Losing your time (here included) & more

In A More Perfect Union, Roger Luke DuBois used dating site info to create “a road atlas of the United States, with the names of cities, towns, and neighborhoods replaced with the words people use to describe themselves and those they want to be with.”

So, this exists, then: http://muppetswithpeopleeyes.tumblr.com/ (And if you write to say you can’t unsee it, I’ll reply in the vein of Airplane!: “You saw the URL, you knew what you were getting into: I say, let ’em crash.”)

May 18, 2009

Monday motion goodness: Waves in HD, bearded hippies, and more

Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg used chalkboard drawings to produce the Autumn Story music video for Firekites. [Via]

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational early-70’s Scanimate demo. Some part of me kind of wishes that Adobe tools involved more retro levers, switches, cable splicing, etc.–and of course that their use was accompanied by funky 70’s horn sections.

Infographics:

Melih Bilgil’s The History of the Internet tells, well, you know, using minimal lines but loads of attention to detail. (The fly-over of Cuba is terrific.) Adobe designer Ethan Eismann writes, “My new personal mission in life is to bring this level or higher of engaging instruction to an Adobe welcome screen near you.”

February 05, 2009

Recent infographics

Queens of InfoVis: “Ever see an awesome graphic or visualization in the New York Times and wonder who did it?” asks MetaFilter. “Chances are it’s either Amanda Cox or Megan Jaegerman.” The site links to some notable examples. [Via]

January 18, 2009

Interesting Inaugural bits from the NYT

The New York Times features an interactive photography portfolio called Obama’s People, offering portraits of key staffers. The audio commentary (via the link below the photos) is worth a listen, describing the subjects’ choices in what to bring to the shoot (e.g. a chocolate chip cookie for David Axelrod). The separate making-of piece features Kathy Ryan talking about how shooting digitally has enhanced the collaborative aspects–and maybe the time pressures–of portraiture. [Update: Ellis Vener points out a hilarious “Real Behind-the-Scenes” take on the shoot, followed by some good discussion in the comments. “Blue Steel…”]

The paper (that term seems more than a little outmoded, doesn’t it?) also features an excellent overview of the Inauguration Day goings-on via a 3D-rendered map and timeline.

I’d love to be in DC in person, but that map triggers a memory of having gotten stuck on the Metro under the Potomac on a sweltering July 4 years ago. With Tuesday temperatures due to hover around freezing, maybe I’m okay with TV after all.

January 09, 2009

Kuler adds Community Pulse

Explore the Kuler global community with Community Pulse, a big picture view of color usage. This is a beta feature, using data visualization (screenshot) to show the relative popularity of colors across a sampling of countries, time periods, and tags.

To check it out,

Sign in with your Adobe ID to play around with it

Mouse over the histogram to see the hues on the color wheel

Try the granularity slider to see more/less color detail

Use the comparison icon (two circles) to compare/contrast

If you have questions, check out Kuler Help. And don’t forget to check out the Kuler panel in Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and InDesign CS4 (see Window->Extensions->Kuler). Here’s a couple of screenshots, plus a video demo. [Via]

New infographics: Hockey Moms to Wu-Tang Clan

DIY 411: MIT’s Mycrocosm is "a Web site that makes it possible for people to use statistical graphs and other visual language tools for expressive social communication. In particular it provides an alternative to purely text based micro-blogging software." [Via]

It’s not an infographic per se, but it riffs nicely on their familiar shapes: Sony’s new Walkman ads play with the forms of famous subway maps. Zooming in on the Sydney piece, you can see that station names have been replaced by bands.

I think I should chart my mood on a line stretching from “Earnest” to “Scurrilous*,” as Vanity Fair does with the content of their Blogopticon. [Via Tom Hogarty] It’s similar to New York Mag’s Approval Matrix.

*Defined as “grossly or obscenely abusive… characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive.” Hells yeah.

Infographic goodness

Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox have created an interesting Flash-based infographic that totes up "All of Inflation’s Little Parts." I often find presentations like this dense, impenetrable, and/or over-designed, but this one’s an exception. [Via]

What does an hour’s worth of movement in front of the TV look like? One Flickr user endeavored to find out, using a video camera & a grid of masking tape to plot the positions of dad, kids, and cat. [Via]

For the greater good:

Easier voting through graphic design: Marcia Lausen is "determined to apply the highest possible standards of information design to make [voting systems] clear, accessible, easy to use and the results accurate." [Via]

The Gough Map is said to be the oldest accurate map of Britain, dating from around 1360.

Signage:

My little brother Ted let me ride along last month as he drove his garbage truck. This safeyman image (somewhat dodgy iPhone-cam quality, sorry) I snapped in his cab shows the truck really putting the “screw” back in “screw of Archimedes.”

Call it "Most Inscrutable. Karaoke Interface. Ever." Or just call it pretty. Robert from Flight404 (see previous) has used Processing to create the lovely video Solar, incorporating lyrics from Goldfrapp. [Via]

ArmsFlow presents global arms transactions, visualized in an interactive map. Clicking individual countries shows their import/export flow for a given year. Interesting concept, but the lines overlap so densely that it’s hard to see what’s happening. I’d love to see the whole thing taken further. [Via]

Artist Andrew Kuo spent the summer hitting as many NY concerts as possible, and he “obsessively charted the entire experience, from reviewing the bands to counting the number of porta-potties.” Check out the results. See also the brief accompanying article. Many more infographics live on his blog.

July 21, 2007

Cool new infographics

The Internets, it’s well known, are a series of tubes. That reality is now depicted in this info graphic from Information Architects Japan, mashing up online players with a map of the Tokyo subway system. Nice to see Adobe occupying what seems to be some sunny downtown space (“They continue to move towards the center of gravity without being too loud about it”). More info on the project is here. [Via]

Edward Tufte celebrates the NYT infographics of Megan Jagerman in a detailed profile on his site. [Via] Speaking of work done in the paper, this week they posted a cool Flash-based map of The Wealthiest Americans Ever, efficiently plotting net worth, rank, and life span.

CraigStatsSF combines data from Craigslist with Google Maps in order to produce heat maps that depict housing cost and density by region. (Disclaimer: “We only identify with hotpockets which are tasty and lethal.”) [Via]

I don’t know whether it’s an infographic per se, and it’s hardly new, but Henrich Bunting’s 16th-century depiction of the world as a cloverleaf (joined at Jerusalem) is interesting enough to deserve mention. [Via]

April 27, 2007

Adventures in Infographics

I’m intrigued by work that strives to make sense of large, complicated sets of data (seeprevious). Along those lines:

This London-style NYC subway map is generating a lot of conversation, both online & inside Adobe. Weird, I remember discussing this exact topic when I first started at an NY Web shop–nine years ago! Bridge engineering manager Arno Gourdol points out Mr. Beck’s Underground Map, a thorough account of the Tube map design. And from there I found this page, brimming with more resources on the subject. [Via]

At FITC last weekend I really enjoyed meeting Evan Roth, the dude behind the SkyMall demographic visualization, laser graffiti, and much more. Though I’m coming up short on links to it, he’s created a method of visualizing one’s daily clicks: wiring up two USB cables from a single mouse, plugging one into a main work computer, and plugging the other into a machine running Photoshop or other graphics app. As you click around email, the Web, etc., you produce a drawing (of sorts) on the other machine, with paint blobs mapped to the same coordinates as your clicks. (It sounds like AttenTV might be doing vaguely similar, for profit.) Oh, and bringing this post full circle, Evan’s crew at Eyebeam has created an interactive NYC subway map.